Saturday night feast of big, big beasts

A few words I didn't expect to be typing this decade: Saturday night on ITV1 is great! Obviously if your tastes err towards a quick Ring Cycle before lights out, or a searingly miserablist documentary about the fact that they no longer make searingly miserablist documentaries quite like they used to, then Saturday-night terrestrial telly is unlikely to float your Viking longship, but last night on BBC4 there was three hours of Tchaikovsky from Moscow, to which you were very welcome.

The linchpin of ITV's Saturday is Primeval, which aims to get the whole family round the box (in fact this only ever happens on The Royle Family). In true British-TV, budget-stretching style, this first series is only a six-parter, but in an ideal world it will run for 16 weeks with a 20-minute break before returning for another four months, and then just go on for ever, like Casualty

Unlike Casualty, however, Primeval made me smile all the way through, though admittedly for a woman who is slightly outside of the dinosaur-loving demographic a lot of that smiling came as a result of the presence of delicious Douglas Henshall.

Space-time continuum slippage is all the televisual rage, but Primeval takes us further back than 1973, and farther away than New Zealand, thanks to a shimmering portal in the Forest of Dean which provides an escape route for the 'saurs, back home to the past and what looks like Lanzarote, via Lostville.

There are big, bitey, roary Scarysaurii and ickle, squeaky, flying Cutosaurii, and a lovely shiny cast of attractive young scientist-types ready to try and track them down, including Hannah Spearritt - one of the female former members of S Club 7 who isn't Jo O'Meara ('I'm a lizard girl!') - and Professor Cutter (Henshall), an evolutionary scientist busy looking for Helen, his wife, who disappeared eight years previously thanks to an Eeeekosourus lurking in Asda's car park.

If I were the Prof and I finally caught up with the missus in Lanzarote, I'd want to ask her what she thought she was doing sneaking around furtively near Asda, in the dark, on her own, when it's not even open ... but perhaps he's not journalistically inclined.

Anyway, Primeval is terrifically good fun, nostalgic and modern at the same time, and exactly what ITV needs to give itself a confidence boost. I love it to pieces. Look out, Dr Who

But with a fluffy, cosy, whiskers-on-kittens review there's obviously a hidden agenda, and in this case I'm just softening you up for the tough stuff - for a searingly miserablist documentary they don't make them like any more. Except they do, obviously, because there it was, last Monday night on Channel 4 (there's a bit of a documentary renaissance under way at C4 of late. And about time).

Jane Treays' Aged 12, And Looking After The Family was one of those almost unbearable films that you none the less know you must watch, and then afterwards you can't quite work out whether you're glad you did, or whether the sheer misery, selfishness, stupidity, hubris and grimy reality it portrayed was actually a bit more than you wanted to take on board, thanks very much.

Depending on how emotionally robust I'm feeling, I seem to write this same review in a slightly different context every few months. It's always a film about children, always made by documentary-makers at the top of their game, and it always makes me feel sad and helpless in the face of so much chaos. Like most people I don't have the Geldof gene, aka the one which means you feel sad and helpless ... and then you get up and do something to change it.

Paul and Amanda are blind and disabled, live on benefits and have six kids. Why have so many kids? wondered Treays of Amanda, pregnant with number seven: 'I enjoy having a big family so much. The reason I like having them is so that they can help us when we get older.'

Selfish cow! I also took issue with Treays's voiceover observation that 'there's no doubt Paul and Amanda love their kids'. Well yes there is a wee bit of a doubt, actually.

The second-oldest girl, Jenny, nine, had already attempted to suffocate herself with a plastic bag, while the eldest, Louise, 12, had the blankest eyes I have seen belonging to someone who isn't actually living in a doorway and whose best friend is a can of Tennant's.

Or maybe the blankness was just tiredness - entirely understandable given that she has to feed, change nappies and dress four younger kids before school, every day. And then again in the afternoon.

The three youngest boys, Matthew, three, Richard, two, and Nigel, eight months, apparently live semi-feral lives while Paul and Amanda sit around, smoking, waiting for the girls to get back from school. No nappies are changed during the day. All offers of outside assistance from social services are rebuffed, bar a couple of hours cleaning a week, which wouldn't be long enough to tackle the washing up, if there were any, but there isn't: the family live on takeaways to save the bother.

'How do you feel when the alarm goes off?' Treays asked Jenny. 'Tired,' she replied without missing a beat. Everybody seemed tired. The baby was filmed asleep face-down on the floor, sprawled like a puppy (thank god there wasn't a puppy) on the poo-coloured carpet in his filthy Babygro, stepped over by the rest of the family. Afterwards I felt tired too, and barely heartened by the news that the family have been moved to a bigger house, social services are keeping an eye on them and Paul and Amanda have been told to smoke outside. I was, I confess, relieved that Amanda lost baby number seven, but the hospital suggested they 'keep trying', so they were.

'They're great parents,' said Jenny in their defence, 'the best I've ever had.'

Channel 4's A Child's Life strand is, in fact, telling us more about parents than it is about kids. The child dancers in Strictly Baby Ballroom (a slightly less spooky Little Miss Sunshine) were sweet-ish and normal-ish, but the parents were predictably super-pushy.

And just as the various subjects of Child Genius were interesting, in a freak-show sort of way, there's really only so much time you want to spend watching a kid solving quadratic equations, talking 'philosophy', playing chess, or just being rather nauseatingly precocious. Eleven-year-old novelist Michael (two of whose seven languages are Mandarin and Old Norse) was filmed cooking his family 'pigeon marinaded in medieval spices and Madeira'. A concoction which, judging by the expression on his sister's face, clearly tasted about as good as it sounded: 'Gorgeously rare!' exclaimed Mum - an Oxford don, but perhaps not much of a cook.

Most of the parents were simply struggling, and occasionally failing, to do the best by their extraordinary kids, whose needs are every bit as special as the more traditional variety. It's what any of us (who are not Paul and Amanda) would want to try to do, but by god it looks tough.

You felt especially for the Minghella family, whose son, Dante, was the most obviously difficult to live with. They weren't particularly delighted on learning he had an IQ of 170, 'What we're interested in is how we can have a happy life with Dante', his mother admitted, with enviable candour.

In stark contrast were the very odd Mr and Mrs Grafton-Clarke, who have taken a sort of Big Brother approach to the raising of their four gifted children, living in a remote house somewhere in East Angular (it's a Big Brother joke) with CCTV, and big signs in the window to that effect, not to mention an insular attitude straight out of Jane Austen, or the Appalachians.

'We feel a huge obligation to mankind,' said Mum, eyes lit with a cultish gleam. 'Desiree for many years has been a very spiritual person.' Uncharitably I thought that assuming the outlook of a 'very spiritual person' is probably a good idea if you're bullied not only for the cardinal sin of cleverness, but also for having unusual (OK, bonkers) parents. No Primeval on a Saturday night for the Grafton-Clarkes, I'd hazard - it's probably plainsong round an open fire, followed by a little light cartography.

The child geniuses are a 10-year project for Channel 4, and it should be revealing. I just hope that at some point they are given a camcorder and encouraged to ask Mum and Dad a few searching questions, too. Whatever the outcome, I blame the parents.

In praise of Patsy

I'm loving the fact that Patsy Kensit, late of Emmerdale and recently installed as the peachiest nurse at Holby City hospital (she looks so great in the uniform that her character, Faye, must spend evenings in front of a Singer, taking them in), is shaping up to become a soap queen.

Technically, and pedantically, Holby isn't a soap but a 'continuing drama series', which is a pretty apt description of Patsy, and probably the reason they've given her character three ex-husbands too, though none are known to be rock gods.

During a career overshadowed by a not-very-private life, it's easy to forget she's done Hollywood (Lethal Weapon 2), pukka costume dramas (Great Expectations, Silas Marner) and had four top 10 hits. But primetime on the Beeb really suits her, and I'd love to see her behind the bar at the Queen Vic, masterminding its revamp as a suitably stylish gastropub. She's still, absurdly, only 38.